Advised that the burial had been observed by locals, Jalloud reportedly became angry and ordered the bodies removed the next night, September 5-6, 1978. The bodies were immediately taken to the Sobha Airbase and from there they were flown by helicopter to the Mediterranean Sea west of Janzour and dumped into the sea.
As a further measure to assure that the disappearance of Imam Sadr was kept quiet, the helicopter was blown up immediately following the dumping of the three bodies which, as noted above, had concrete cinder blocks tied to their legs. A former Libyan Revolutionary Council member, Abdul-Moneim al-Huni, claims to have information that his disappeared brother-in- law, pilot Lt. Col. Najieddine Yazigi, who piloted helicopters at the Sobha Air Base flew the helicopter. He claims that a former aide to Jalloud told him that after dumping the Sadr delegation bodies, the helicopter his relative al-Yazaji was piloting was ordered shot down on the return flight. It was reportedly hit by a missile and it exploded above the Mediterranean.
Libya's Foreign Minister at the time, the affable Taha El Sheriff Ben Amer, who was also privy to the Sadr-Gadaffi meeting and the forced removal of Sadr's delegation, was also soon killed in an unexplained helicopter crash. He was reportedly killed because the regime, specifically Jalloud, did not trust the loquacious diplomat to keep quiet about what he knew.
It was Mohamad Alkhadar, during a 2012 meeting at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Cairo, that the close Muammar Gadaffi associative revealed that Libyan intelligence operative Mohamad Rehiby with two other agents were sent to Rome to check into the Holiday Inn carrying the Musa Sadr delegation passports and luggage. Rehiby, was wearing the Imams clothes and he shuffled a bit as he walked on elevated shoes wanting to appear taller. Imam Sadr was 6 feet 6 inches tall, Rehiby barely six feet. Instead Rehiby drew curious stares from the hotel front desk staff and guests, compromising his mission a bit.
They had been instructed by Libyan intelligence to create the false impression that the Imam Sadr delegation has been kidnapped in Rome as part of a Shia rivalry. In February of 2006, an investigation by an Italian court determined that claims that Imam Sadr left Libya for Italy to have been a clumsily perpetrated hoax.
The above sequence of events and the fate of the Imam Sadr delegation is what Gaddafi's son, Seif al-Islam, currently freed from imprisonment in Zintan, West of Tripoli, and currently the well hosted guest of a Gadaffi friendly tribe in the area, has made a black joke about more than once.
Seif sometimes has mentioned to inquirers, including an Italian journalist as well as to this observer at Tripoli's Rixos Hotel in July of 2011, that "Sayed Musa Sadr and his friends came to dinner to eat some fish. But, as things turned out, some fish ate them."
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